Candidly Speaking: Concerning ‘self-hating Jews’

Avraham Burg described Israel “as the last colonial occupier in the Western world.”

Avraham Burg in Indian headress.
(photo credit:REUTERS)

In a column appearing in The Independent, the fiercely anti-Israel UK daily,
Avram Burg, former Knesset speaker, chairman of the Jewish Agency and scion of
one of Israel’s renowned religious Zionist families, commended the UK government
for measures designed to boycott Israeli goods produced beyond the Green Line
and urged the EU to do likewise “in Israel’s interest.”

Burg, who had the
chutzpah to state that he was writing as a Zionist, described Israel “as the
last colonial occupier in the Western world” and proclaimed that “the Israeli
people’s eyes are blind and their ears are deaf” and the “real enemy of Israel’s
future is Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel.”

In the past,
Burg has called for the abrogation of the Law of Return, which he defined as “a
mirror image of Hitler.” He has described the Jewish state as “a ghetto of
belligerent colonialism” and urged Israelis to obtain foreign passports. He also
recommended the dismantlement of Yad Vashem and its substitution by new
headquarters for the International Criminal Court.

Yet few would dare to
describe this man, whose mother’s family was butchered in 1929 during the
pogroms in Hebron, as a “self-hating Jew.”

That is because one of the
most effective accomplishments chalked up by political far-left activists was
their success in eliminating the term “self-hating Jew” from the Jewish
political lexicon. They are abetted by those from the extreme Right who
indiscriminately label every Jewish critic of Israeli policy a self-hating
Jew.

By cynically employing inverse McCarthyist tactics to silence their
critics, the far Left succeeded in intimidating politicians and writers into
adopting a form of political correctness which suppresses mention of one of the
primary factors motivating the bizarre Jewish involvement in the campaign to
demonize and delegitimize Israel.

Today, anyone employing the term
“self-hating” in relation to Jews is summarily condemned and accused of being
chauvinistic.

Yet any objective review of Jewish history demonstrates
that self-hatred was always an important element motivating Jews who turned
against their own people and far predates the existence of Israel.

The
current situation was accurately summarized in a recent interview with Howard
Jacobson, recipient of the highly coveted Man Booker Prize for the novel The
Finkler Question, which satirized British anti-Semitism and self-hating
Jews.

Ironically, his interview with Maya Sela appeared in the English
Internet edition of the Israeli daily Haaretz, which is probably the most
important global media platform promoting the rantings of Jews demonizing
Israel.

Jacobson nonchalantly abandons political correctness by ignoring
the taboo on the term “self-hating Jews” when referring to Jews who demonize and
delegitimize Israel.

He relates to “the need for Jews to be, one way or
another, anti-Jewish. The need for so many Jews, particularly intellectual Jews,
to express their hatred with embarrassment with Jewishness, and hating Israel is
just the latest version of it. Jews were doing that long before there was a
modern State of Israel... I suppose that if you belong to a minority that has
been hated for so long, then you begin to sort of absorb some of that. It would
be very surprising if you didn’t. In psychology they would tell you that an
abused child will in the end come to take the view of himself that the abuser
has. I don’t doubt that some Jews do that.”

OVER THE ages, anti-Semitism
has inflicted such devastating suffering on the Jewish people that it inevitably
spawned a small but highly vocal number of Jews obsessed with dissociating
themselves.

If one analyzes the behavior of Jewish apostates during the
Middle Ages, notorious for accusing their kinsmen of satanic rites and churning
out the vilest anti- Semitic tracts, there is little doubt that they were
motivated by self-hatred and opportunism.

The era of Emancipation also
witnessed Jewish Universalists engaged in campaigns defaming their fellow Jews.
In the 19th-century socialist revolutionary arena, self-hatred led to justifying
pogroms as a lubricant to generate revolutions.

Karl Marx was a prime
example of this. Although converted to Christianity, he was a descendant of a
long line of rabbis. His noxious self-hatred was the basis for his vile
anti-Semitic tract Zur Judenfrage, in which he stated that “money is a jealous
God of Israel... The social emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of
society from Judaism.”

The tradition of self-hatred was sustained by
Jewish communists. In the Soviet Union, the members of the Yevsektsia, the
Jewish section of the Bolsheviks, were notorious for behaving more harshly and
displaying a greater determination to destroy synagogues and Jewish cultural
institutions than their non-Jewish counterparts.

Western Jewish
communists applauded Stalin’s murder of Jews and crimes against the Jewish
people and were among the staunchest defenders of the Evil Empire.

In
Israel, the fellow-traveling members of Mapam, the forerunner of Meretz, behaved
as schizophrenics, seeking to combine their Zionism with love and allegiance to
the Soviet Union, even when one of their leaders, Mordechai Oren, was arrested
and tried on trumped-up espionage charges in Czechoslovakia.

Yet it was
only after the Oslo Accords, when Labor (Mapai) was desperately trying to
convince Israelis that peace with the fork-tongued Arafat was feasible, that the
self-haters emerged en masse from the closet. They assumed prominent roles at
universities and attained political respectability by infiltrating the Labor
Party and obtaining excessive media coverage in Haaretz and its English-language
website, which prior to becoming dominated by post-Zionists was considered the
leading intellectual newspaper of the land. Today it vigorously promotes
journalists who demonize the state with the same vigor as their communist
antecedents.

The Israeli self-haters range from outright political
psychopaths like former Israeli musician Gilad Atzmon who justifies the Nazi
murder of the Jews, to failed politician Avram Burg who delegitimizes his
country. They include journalists who paved the way for the Goldstone Report and
charges of war crimes against Israel by demonizing the IDF, while defending the
intransigent and duplicitous Palestinians.

In addition, there are some
Diaspora Jews, ugly blemishes on the fringes of Jewish communities throughout
the world, who stand at the vanguard of the anti-Israeli pack. Most of those
engaged in these activities, unlike Avram Burg, stem from assimilated or
delusional leftist backgrounds and have no genuine involvement in Jewish
life.

But occasional despicable behavior by groups on the extreme Right
may also qualify as a manifestation of self-hatred. Ironically, I clearly
recollect the late National Religious Party leader Dr. Josef Burg, father of
Avram, confessing to me that he was having sleepless nights out of concern that
some Jews residing in isolated settlements would absorb and transform the fierce
animosity radiated by Palestinians surrounding them into a form of self-hatred
which could manifest itself by anti-social behavior.

In summary,
“self-hating Jews” is unquestionably a term which should be employed to identify
those small pockets of Jews who demonize their own people.

But it should
be employed in a highly selective manner and not utilized indiscriminately
against naïve, well-meaning “bleeding hearts” or legitimate critics of Israeli
policies with whom we may disagree.

The writer’s website can be viewed at
www.wordfromjerusalem.com. He may be contacted at
ileibler@netvision.net.il